JDK VS Kotest

Completely gutted from the OpenJDK, last I checked. See here for the culprit PR: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/18688

> Yes, they're changing one aspect of signal handler use to work around this problem. They're not stopping the use of signal handlers in general. Hotspot continues to use signals for efficiency in general. See https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/9059727df135dc90311bd476...

This whole thread is about SIGSEGV, and specifically their SIGSEGV handling. However, catching normal signals is not about efficiency.

Some of their exception handling is still odd: There is no reason for a program that receives SIGILL to ever attempt continuing. But others is fine, like catching SIGFPE to just forward an exception to the calling code.

(Sure, you could construct an argument to say that this is for efficiency if you considered the alternative to be implementing floating point in software so that all exceptions exist in user-space, but hardware floating point is the norm and such alternative would be wholly unreasonable.)

> The wonderful thing about choosing not to care about facts is having whatever opinions you want.

I appreciate the irony of you making such statement, proudly thinking that your opinion equals fact, and therefore any other opinion is not.

This discussion is nothing but subjective opinion vs. subjective opinion. Facts are (hopefully, as I can only speak for myself) inputs to both our opinions, but no opinion about "good" or "bad", "nasty" or not can ever be objective. Objective code quality does not exist.

I remember talking to Brendan about the PreserveFramePointer patch during my first months at Netflix in 2015. As of JDK 21, unfortunately it is no longer a general purpose solution for the JVM, because it prevents a fast path being taken for stack thawing for virtual threads: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/d32ce65781c1d7815a69ceac...

Map doesn't implement the Collection interface.

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/java.base/sha...

C++ lets you write anything you can imagine, and the language features and standard library often facilitate that. The committee espouses the view that they want to provide many "zero [runtime] cost," abstractions. Anybody can contribute to the language, although the committee process is often slow and can be political, each release the surface area and capability of the language gets larger.

I believe Hazard Pointers are slated for C++26, and these will add a form "free later, but not quite garbage collection" to the language. There was a talk this year about using hazard pointers to implement a much faster std::shared_ptr.

It's a language with incredible depth because so many different paradigms have been implemented in it, but also has many pitfalls for new and old users because there are many different ways of solving the same problem.

I feel that in C++, more than any other language, you need to know the actual implementation under the hood to use it effectively. This means knowing not just what the language specifies, but can occaissionally require knowing what GCC or Clang generate on your particular hardware.

Many garbage collected languages are written in or have parts of their implementations in C++. See JS (https://github.com/v8/v8)and Java GC (https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/tree/36de19d4622e38b6c00644b0...)

I am not an expert on Java (or C++), so if someone knows better or can add more please correct me.

As you might know, Advent of Code will begin this Friday! If, like me, you want to have a go at solving the puzzles in Kotlin, I would like to share with you a little library I've developed to reduce boilerplate and solve the puzzles in a test-driven approach. It is based on Kotest, a modern and Kotlin-first test framework.

Kotlin testing with Kotest and MockK

As a matter of fact, in the previous examples, we have shifted a bit away from the TDD standards in the meaning that we test not only the operability of our code, but rather check if the code runs according to certain specifications (Given/When/Then). These specifications are our tests, and the syntactic sugar in the form of the possibility to give clear names to the tests using DisplayName and the grouping of the tests by a set of similar attributes helps us clearly formulate these specifications. There is an entire family of frameworks in different languages that allow us to create such specifications: for Java it is Spock, for Ruby—RSpec, and for Kotlin—Spek and Kotest frameworks. Below, I will go into more detail about them.

I've tried so many times. SO MANY. I love the idea of mutation testing. Even chatGPT couldn't help me. It just made up fake mutation testing frameworks to try. To me, pitest is dead. kotest is not mutation testing, but it's property testing is the next best thing I have found to revolutionize your unit tests.

The extensions are not particularly useful in this scenario because the described functionality can be incorporated into the Host class. On the other hand, they flourish in test frameworks like Kotest and enable the rapid development of useful add-ons like custom matchers. Extending third-party libraries with utility functions is another prevalent use case. In the next sections, we'll zero in on this specific aspect.

We're using Kotest for our unit tests and are quite happy with it.

Basic testing in Kotlin with Kotest built for kotlin specificatlly (upcoming)

Here you are: https://github.com/kotest/kotest/issues/189